Today we have an issue of the French Canadian tabloid Le Rendez-Vous published today in 1969 with cover star Rosa Dolmai, who’s also known as Rosa Domaille, but is probably most famous as Eve Eden. Under all three names she carved out a career as a glamour model, appearing in scores of publications ranging from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood to Gala. Occasionally she posed explicitly, which positions her well ahead of most of her peers in that regard. She also made at least one nudie loop, and branched out and landed small parts in twenty-seven films from 1961 to 1968. She’s been featured here on Pulp Intl. several times, including in the adventure magazine Adam and the tabloid Minuit, and last spring memorably appeared—branching out again, in a way—as a blonde up a tree. You can see that here.
There’s interesting material beyond the Dolmai cover. If you read French there’s good gossip under the bowler hat logo in “Pour hommes seulment.” Then the editors do it again under the header “Panora-Monde,” because one good round of gossip deserves another. Meanwhile, Frenchwoman Theresa St. John declares that sex is her religion, and to make the point crystal clear Le Rendez-Vous presents her with nuns in the background. It’s not as weird as it seems—vintage cinema has taught us that nuns are the horniest species of penguin. Musician and actress Rina Berti, who released one album and appeared in the 1974 sex comedy C’est jeune et ça sait tout!, puts in an appearance, nude behind a guitar. And the beautiful Christiane Schmidtmer, who we’ve featured in Le Rendez-Vous‘ sister publication Midnight and who appeared in the women-in-prison movie The Big Doll House, gets the centerspread.
Le Rendez-Vous also leans heavily into gore. Who knew Canada could be so violent? Maybe it really should be part of the United States. Then a closer reading reveals that in order to fill its blood quotient, Le Rendez-Vous features mostly crimes from other countries. There’s a two page spread, “de la vie l’americaine”—American life. Elsewhere an Indiana man shotguns his wife, and in Boston a fifteen-year-old boy cuts off his fingers and mails them to his girlfriend. The Brits get a spotlight dance too, as a woman is raped and killed on a London street. So in the end there’s not enough violence in Canada to fill an issue of one of its leading tabloids. It can’t join the U.S. after all.
